Good design we have! :-)

I received some comments about my sofa plan. Charles says the sofa is for the eye, not for relaxation. Actually, I wrote about this before and I gave up on owning a Barcelona chair by Mies. Ahh, now I give up Ou Baholyodhin too, But I do agree with Charles. He wrote an essay about Le Corbusier armchair. Hmm, I was thinking of LC4 too. But later, not now.

Any ways, he commented that "Japan is definitely about 3 years ahead of the rest of the world in graphic design". From yesterday's daily the worst uniform at the Olympic opening (I still check the Yahoo forum again and again, because you know, pain and ugliness is strong stimulus. It caught my eye!). So it is a little hard to say " YES! I think so" ha ha ha

I have some my favorite publisher's of design and interiors. One is this pie books. Thier new "Japanese traditional design series" are so beautiful. Here is Katachi(Shape), Kingyo (Goldenfish), Haiku (image of haiku) and Wagashi(japanese sweets). A little expensive, but I will get some of them.

Comments

[Charles]

Yes, Japan is very advanced in design, but there is plenty of bad design too, like those Olympic uniforms. I don't think the USA designs are any better, did you see the ugly hats? Yuck.

With so much design work, there are always a few failures. You need the freedom to produce junk, if nobody does experiments, there is no advancement. I think Japanese design evolves more quickly than other places in the world. Perhaps some of it is "kaizen," but I think Japanese design evolves faster because in Japan, design trends rise quickly and end very quickly. I might compare it to British music trends. England is a small island, and a record can become a hit very quickly, and fade away very quickly. So musicians can become a hit by selling fewer records than in a big country like America, you don't have to sell millions of records to become popular, just a few thousand. There is more choice, more diversity, and of course, more failures, but also more hits. And Japanese media is like that too. In a small country, a design idea "reaches saturation" quickly, and fades quickly. And then you have to come up with new ideas quickly. We can easily ignore the failures, when we see all the successes.